here may be those who would like to deter you
from your search. And now I will leave you alone in this delightful
moonlight. I quite envy you your unrestricted communion with Nature.
Adios, amigo, adios!"

He leaped lightly on a large rock that overhung the edge of the grade,
and waved his hand.

"I wouldn't do that, Mr. Chivers," said Collinson, with a concerned
face; "them rocks are mighty ticklish, and that one in partiklar. A
tech sometimes sends 'em scooting."

Mr. Chivers leaped quickly to the ground, turned, waved his hand again,
and disappeared down the grade.

But Collinson was no longer alone. Hitherto his characteristic
reveries had been of the past,--reminiscences in which there was only
recollection, no imagination, and very little hope. Under the spell of
Chivers's words his fancy seemed to expand; he began to think of his
wife as she might be now,--perhaps ill, despairing, wandering
hopelessly, even ragged and footsore, or--believing HIM dead--relapsing
into the resigned patience that had been his own; but always a new
Sadie, whom he had never seen or known before. A faint dread, the
lightest of misgivings (perhaps coming from his very ignorance), for
the first time touched his steadfast heart, and sent a chill through
it. He shouldered his weapon, and walked briskly towards the edge of
the thick-set woods. There were the fragrant essences of the laurel
and spruce--baked in the long-day sunshine that had encompassed their
recesses--still coming warm to his face; there were the strange
shiftings of temperature throughout the openings, that alternately
warmed and chilled him as he walked. It seemed so odd that he should
now have to seek her instead of her coming to him; it would never be
the same meeting to him, away from the house that he had built for her!
He strolled back, and looked down upon it, nestling on the ledge. The
white moonlight that lay upon it dulled the glitter of lights in its
windows, but the sounds of laughter and singing came to even his
unfastidious ears with a sense of vague discord. He walked back again,
and began to pace before the thick-set wood. Suddenly he stopped and
listened.

To any other ears but those accustomed to mountain solitude it would
have seemed nothing. But, familiar as he was with all the infinite
disturbances of the woodland, and even the simulation of intrusion
caused by a falling branch or lapsing pine-cone, he was arrested now by
a recurring